Creative professionals often utilize a variety of pictures such as photographs, illustrations, or drawings as part of media content creation. Media content creation can include generation of many different types of designs, including those for marketing materials, backgrounds, book illustrations, presentations, web pages, and so forth. Creative professionals may personally create pictures that are incorporated into a design, or creative professionals may obtain pictures from external sources, such as from a content sharing service. Accordingly, even a single item of media content may have designs that include a variety of pictures obtained from a number of different sources. Each of these pictures is carefully selected to convey an intended meaning of the creative professional.
Although sometimes overlooked outside of the creative industry, the appearance of text in media content is also important to conveying the intended meaning of a given design. Different fonts are used to render text with different appearances in various designs. Designers carefully choose fonts to establish a mood, convey a desired aesthetic, engender an emotion, communicate a meaning, generate interest, provide a unifying theme, or simply to attract attention. Thus, the appearance of text is one of the top elements in design, including graphic design, web design, interaction design, and so forth.
Unfortunately, a problem arises when a design travels electronically from one computing device to another. To render text in accordance with a desired font, a computing device refers to the desired font to access instructions that describe how to draw individual characters of text. However, not all fonts are present on all computing devices. A font that is available on a source computing device may not be available on a destination computing device due to any of a number of possible reasons.
In some situations, a desired font can be embedded in a file having a given design. In these situations, the font is automatically communicated along with the design. But such embedding is not always feasible. First, technical issues may preclude embedding. For instance, there may not be sufficient bandwidth to include the font in the file having the design. Also, there is no guarantee that a destination computing device is capable of rendering text with a particular embedded font. Second, legal issues may preclude embedding a font into a file having a design. Generally, a person purchases a non-transferable right (e.g., a license) to use a font on a single computing device or a set number of computing devices. A user may therefore not have a legal right to embed a font into a design being transmitted to a destination computing device, or the destination computing device may lack a license to use the font legally.
For these reasons, embedding a font into a design is often infeasible. Consequently, a destination computing device may receive a design that identifies a font without embedding the identified font. The destination computing device is then responsible for determining a replacement font for the missing font. There are a couple of conventional approaches to determining a replacement font when a destination computing device receives a design without an embedded font. In a first conventional approach, the destination computing device uses a dialogue box to ask a user thereof to select a font. This is unhelpful to the user inasmuch as little if any guidance is provided to the user. Further, this approach makes no effort to reproduce the appearance of the text as intended by the designer.
In a second conventional approach, the destination computing device attempts to match a local font to the identified, but missing, font. The destination computing device attempts to find a matching font that is similar to the identified font using heuristics. A heuristics-based technique uses, for example, font metadata embedded in a design that specifies such things as font family, weight, regular versus italics, recommended use, and so forth. The embedded font metadata is compared to font metadata of local fonts to attempt to find a match. Unfortunately, heuristics-based techniques are ad-hoc and produce unpredictable results because fonts with similar metadata can have dramatically different appearances. Furthermore, heuristics rules tend to be fragile and capable of working with only a limited, predetermined set of known fonts.
Thus, conventional approaches to font replacement for when a design does not embed an identified font fail to maintain the visual appearance of text as desired by the creative professional that generated the design. Consequently, the overall intended meaning and effect of the design is compromised.